Author
Topic: To SEO or Not to SEO...That is the question (Read 8147 times)

gordontaylor

If you've been at this as long as I have, you'll notice that SEO never seems to go away. If you have customers that you build websites or e-commerce solutions for, you know that all they do is complain about their rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The fact is that at the MOST, 35% of your website traffic comes from Search Engines. To be sure, that is an important number, but most people put far too much importance on it. In fact many rely on it and that is just plain foolish. If you only look for SE traffic, you're doomed to failure. Period.

NOTHING BEATS PAID TRAFFIC. Sorry, wasn't shouting there, just making a point. Paid advertising online and off line is the bread and butter you'll be living on. More and more, companies are relying on offline to online traffic. I do a fair amount of direct mail to drive traffic to websites.

State Farm Insurance is the largest insurance company in America and their total income is more than #2 through #10 combined. Until last year they were spending several hundred million dollars a month on SEO services and direct marketing online. For the first time ever, they began to lose market share! When you're making 2 billion a month, yes a month, in revenue, a few hundred million doesn't seem like that much.

Their marketing department took a step back, crunched the number and ABANDONED SEO and online advertising, except for branding campaigns with banner ads. The poured that money they had been spending on online advertising/SEO work into offline to online marketing and not only gained that lost market share back, but actually increase their market share even more! So keep that little story in mind when you're building your online empire!

Now, having said that, it's still an important skill to learn and if you do this for a living it's a good bragging point to show your potential customers. I consider myself an expert in White Hat SEO techniques and I will be sharing my knowledge with you. I'll be posting step by step techniques that will include screen shots and how to tutorials.

SEO is a technique to get traffic on your website and increase its ranking in organic manner. You can also get the same by PPC but that may cost you a great amount so its better to perform SEO techniques in order to achieve desired results.